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by wynnesome



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Angst, Battleworld (Marvel), Break Up, M/M, Secret Wars (2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 06:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21239675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnesome/pseuds/wynnesome
Summary: Run ragged with the work of holding together their newly cobbled world, Victor and Stephen steal away for an hour's privacy.It turns out they have differing ideas when it comes to balancing duty and humanity.





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_casual_cheesecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/gifts).

> For [Cake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake), who wanted sentences as rewards for doing Things. She prompted, "break-up email," and I happened to have scribbled down a couple of lines about a breakup, minus the email, the other day. So I fiddled with it to this result. 
> 
> Unbetaed. We die like god-emperors.

In the aftermath, they both lay undone, still heaving and roiling like quake-ridden earth. It had been too long; endless weeks of endless insufficient hours exacting order, running on covert glimpses, veiled glances, and immaculate, agonizing formalities. Desires hobbled to stately decorum.  
  
Buried beneath duty and godhood, seismic pressure had risen to a fault: a cataclysmic stolen hour of desperation and tectonic disaster.  
  
Of their bodies, it was the fingers only that remained entwined; fingers, and auras and the material of souls, as known to sorcerers.  
  
Their unfocused stares diverged; they sighted one another in richer threads, intricate tapestries through their minds' eyes.  
  
"I had forgotten," Victor said tersely, roughly parting the silence.  
  
"I had not."  
  
A dark, dismissive sound rumbled forth. "Fine. I had not, either. I had... set aside. What it is like to feel the... enormity of all that you make me feel."  
  
It had been a spiritual restorative to Stephen as well. "In all of this -- the building and gluing together of a world -- perhaps there is a part of our humanity that has become lost, forgotten or forsaken, to us both."  
  
Victor _hnn_'d quietly. In less than a word, Stephen recognized the equivocation it contained.  
  
"You do not agree?"  
  
"This can not go on."  
  
There were always aftershocks. But perhaps his heart could yet be pulled from the rubble.  
  
"What if... what if I am not so easily dismissed?"   
  
"You are not. My right hand excels in its service, and I would not sever it. I need you to remain my Sheriff.  
  
Tremors, more tremors. From the fissures of his being.  
  
He turned his face, his wet and fleshly eyes, toward his lover, his ruler, the arbiter of his life.

Victor's were closed.  
  
"Please, Victor, that can not be necessary. You can be a man with me and still a god to your realm. A better one, for holding to this humanity," he entreated. It was the ground that was unsteady, and the air, not his own voice.  
  
"Stephen, no. It is as you knew from the start. No man should bear the powers of a god, as I do."  
  
He was implacable. He was unshaken. He was still, his fingers neither closing round nor releasing Stephen's.  
  
"If I must stand in judgment, I wish to be neither cruel nor benevolent. He who holds this position must be absolute; exalted and feared, inspiring veneration and terror in equal measure. Doom will enact. He will reward; he will strike down. He will not rejoice, nor will he regret."  
  
His fingers had slid free and his soul had slipped away.  
  
Stephen was the epicenter. He awaited salvage.


End file.
